


fortunate son

by t_fic (topaz), topaz, topaz119 (topaz)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Weechesters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-07-16
Updated: 2007-07-16
Packaged: 2017-10-11 16:43:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/114489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/topaz/pseuds/t_fic, https://archiveofourown.org/users/topaz/pseuds/topaz, https://archiveofourown.org/users/topaz/pseuds/topaz119
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mary had asked John about it once, when she was pregnant with Sam, right when the dedication ceremonies were playing out nightly on the six o'clock news, Tom Brokaw pacing grave and restrained along the length of the black granite wall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	fortunate son

**Author's Note:**

> Pre-series; general spoilers for the show. Written for the [](http://community.livejournal.com/poorboyshuffle/profile)[**poorboyshuffle**](http://community.livejournal.com/poorboyshuffle/) challenge. I picked CCR's _Fortunate Son_, because I've had that song in my head for the Winchesters from about 30 seconds after we first met John for real.

The Skyline Parkway snaked north, dipping and twisting through the mountains of western Virginia. The Impala should have been heading west, toward Blue Earth and Jim's rambling, comfortable parsonage, but something deep in John's gut had insisted that now was the time, and so he'd stopped at a pay phone and left a message on the church's answering machine that they'd be a little later than he'd expected. They were done with the latest job--another of the First Families cleansed of a less-than-loving ancestor--and the boys were sleeping soundly in the back.

John had spent a fair amount of time in this part of the country, had even worked a poltergeist at one of the museums a few years back, so he couldn't blame the insistent pull toward the memorial only on being close. It was just time. That was as best he could explain it.

Mary had asked him about it once, when she was pregnant with Sam, right when the dedication ceremonies were playing out nightly on the six o'clock news, Tom Brokaw pacing grave and restrained along the length of the black granite wall. It was the only time John ever turned away from her, walking out of the house and into the cold Kansas night. She'd waited up for him, her irritation melting away as he knelt next to their bed, his hand sliding over her thickened waist, and accepted his kisses as the apology he intended, all he could offer in explanation. It wasn't her fault, none of it was, but he didn't know the words to tell her.

Nearly eight years later, he still didn't have the words, but there wasn't anyone left to hear them anyway.

 

***

Not quite six in the morning and the heat and humidity already baked deep into John's bones. He'd found his way into the District by default, I-66 turning into the Roosevelt Bridge and then a short trip south along the Potomac to the Lincoln Memorial. The streets were starting to get busy right at dawn, the monuments still lit by their floodlights: first the Lincoln, dignified and imposing in the night; the Jefferson, curved and graceful in the distance, the statue inside dark against the marble; the Washington Monument stark and pure.

DC was set up for tourists; even not knowing where he needed to go, there were enough signs to get him close. He looped around the Lincoln Memorial and eased the car into a parking space along the river, closing the door quietly behind him. Dean shifted at the noise, coming awake like the point man he was.

"It's all right, Dean. Just stretching out the kinks." There wasn't much need to keep his voice down; Sammy could--and did--sleep through target practice if he was tired enough, but Dean wasn't really awake, not fully. As long as John gave him the okay, he'd go right back out and John still wasn't sure what explanation to offer for where they were. "Couple more hours 'til you need to be up; I'll wake you if I need you."

"'K, Dad." Dean rubbed his face and flopped back over onto his stomach, shoving Sammy's foot out of his way.

John ended up going no further than the front of the car. He leaned against her fender, drinking the last of the coffee from the diner attached to the filling station in Front Royal, watching as the light of the rising sun slid over his boys.

 

***

Despite all the moving around, Sammy had done well in his first year of school, taking to books and learning with equal parts of intelligence and a stubborn determination to catch up with his brother. Dean never did badly--at least not once he figured out that decimals were nothing more than batting averages and that angles and line segments meant something concrete on a pool table--but Sam had a serious love of books, spending the long hours John sometimes needed in the library happily paging through encyclopedias that John knew damn well he couldn't read. _He likes the pictures, Dad_, Dean had explained patiently, dropping another armful of reference books on the table. _It's no big deal_, but John saw how often Dean looked up from his own homework to answer questions and read captions. In the one parent-teacher conference he'd been able to make, the teacher had smiled and told him that Sammy hadn't ever met a random fact he didn't love.

So John wasn't at all surprised that Sammy climbed out of the back seat and looked around, ignoring the river right next to him in favor of the less natural landmarks. "_Dad_. That's the Washington Monument. I thought we were going to Pastor Jim's. Did you know it took thirty-six years to build that and they ran out of stone halfway through? My teacher says you can see the difference; can we go look at it while we're here?"

Or that Dean followed him, supremely unimpressed by the scenery and hauling out a box of donuts John hadn't noticed him acquiring and sharing them around for breakfast.

Dark and light, theory and practicality. His boys.

 

***

Seventy-eight steps up to the Lincoln Memorial and John only had Dean by four. It didn't help that Dean grinned at him, bouncing on his toes while John tried not to have a stroke. "Next time," Dean said, before he charged halfway back down to pace Sammy the rest of the way up.

The view from the top of the steps was as dramatic as John had heard--the Reflecting Pool quiet and still in the oppressive heat, the Washington Monument mirrored in it perfectly and the Mall green and surprisingly lush around them both--but pretending that he was there to show it to the boys wasn't doing anything but wasting time. After the first few minutes of pointing out things, Dean gave John a sharp-eyed look but before he could actually say anything, Sammy dragged him off to read the speeches carved on the walls.

John stayed where he was for a bit, watching as Dean lounged against a pillar and Sammy stared intently at the Gettysburg Address. Idly, he wondered if Sammy knew what he was trying to read. You never knew what bits the kid picked up from conversations around him.

As John walked up, Sammy turned toward Dean with a narrow-eyed stare of annoyance that was as familiar to John as his own heartbeat.

"Okay, four score and seven years? That makes no sense."

"Shows how much you know, twerp."

"Dean," John warned.

"Sorry, sir." Dean managed to put enough sincerity in his voice that John could let it slide. "It's a number, Sammy."

"_Score?_ Is a _number?_" Sammy spun around to John, huffing indignantly. There were times John swore he was seven going on seventy-seven, crankier than any ten old coots. "Dad, now he's just making stuff up."

John opened his mouth to tell Sammy to settle down and stop whining, but before he could say a word, Dean had stepped in with explanations and some kind of game involving hands and feet and Sammy was happily trying to crack the code and translate the numbers and not that John had needed any confirmation, but Dean definitely knew something was up.

John just needed to do what he needed to do and get back on schedule. Jim wouldn't worry, not exactly, but if they were more than a day late, John knew the feelers would start going out.

 

***

In the end, it didn't get any easier; he just made himself go through the motions. He only needed to find one name in the directory, but he stood there a long time after he wrote the information down, until someone came up behind him, waiting patiently for a turn at the book.

The closer they came to the path that dipped down toward the juncture of the two walls, the quieter the crowds around them became.

"Dean." Sammy's voice was hushed, uncertain.

"Yeah, squirt?"

"All the names, Dean. They're over my head and they're gonna be over Daddy's head soon and ..." Sammy's voice dropped to a whisper. "They all died. That's what the sign said, it said that everyone's name that's written on the wall, they died."

John slowed down and the boys caught up with him as Dean said, "I think that's the point."

 

***

They found the right panel, finally; W2, near the center and one of the tallest, with names starting well over John's head. Looking right, he could see the Washington Monument in the distance and half-expected to hear more chatter about it from Sammy, but both boys were quiet and there was no excuse to not do what he was here to do. He shoved the piece of paper in his pocket--he didn't need to look at it again--and counted down fifty-seven lines of names.

The stone was smooth where the names weren't, warm against his skin as he traced across the row until his fingers came to rest on _Thomas Ryan Rollins_ and the hot summer morning faded into the unbreathable swamp of Quang Tri and TR laughing at him. _Fuckin' A, son, of course you're a rifleman; what the hell else would you be with that name?_

A plane thundered overhead and it took John long seconds to see the 747 on its landing approach rather than the squadron of F-16s he was looking for.

"Dad?" They were reflected in the polished black granite, his boys, Dean standing close behind John, not touching but watching him, steady and strong, Sammy a step further back, his eyes big and serious, his hand clutched tightly in the hem of Dean's t-shirt, like a security blanket.

"Taught me everything I needed to know," John said, stopping before he added, _everything I needed to know to stay alive_. Dean nodded, though, like he understood, and hell, with everything Dean had seen, maybe he did, even if he was only eleven. He reached up and touched the name, too, his hand dirty and so fucking small next to John's.

"Mortar fire," John said, reading the question in Dean's eyes. "Wrong place at the wrong time."

There were things John needed to tell them, about the right choice not always being the easiest and no guarantees in life at all, but he couldn't, not lost in the in the memory of TR, his head on John's lap, drowning in his own blood, dying with his eyes locked with John's.

John lost track of how long they stood in the bright hot sun before a volunteer, graying hair pulled back in a neat ponytail, stepped up beside John to make a rubbing of a name that was too high for the woman standing next to him to reach.

John shifted aside to give him room to work, but couldn't break his own contact with the wall, with TR.

"Can I help you, buddy?"

_Buddy_, John thought. Back then, in Quang Tri and Saigon, in the jungles and the villages, you never needed to know a name, not when every grunt, every GI answered to that. The other man knew it, too; John could hear it in his voice.

"No," he answered, tracing over TR's name again. "I'm ... okay." He was, suddenly; okay enough to let a small part of himself go, let it be washed clean under the compassion and understanding in a total stranger's face.

Dean was quiet and still next to him, but Sammy shifted restlessly. John got hold of himself, started break the connection, but Dean said quickly, "We'll go sit over there." He waved toward the sloping grass, away from the neatly swept pavers and the quiet, slowly moving current of people. "We'll be fine, Dad. C'mon, Sammy."

John watched them go, Sammy holding Dean's hand, walking on the outside, away from the names; watched them walk the long stone path from where they left him in the center up to where the polished black granite was only a few inches high and then out past the podiums holding the directories. They found a place where they could lie back on the grass and watch the planes go by every few minutes.

John didn't need much more time, and he didn't need to move from TR's panel. His entire time in-country was in front of him, from the rifleman whose place he took, fifteen rows above TR, to the medic taken out by a sniper as he worked on John, right before the Huey set down next to them, sixty-two rows below, it was all there--_they_ were all there. John found as many names as he could remember, touching the unfamiliar ones, too, because there were more faces in his memories, and then turned to find his sons.

He drove more slowly out of the city, Sammy half-hanging out the back window, crowing with satisfaction to see the change in limestone on the Washington Monument, Dean's hand firmly in his belt loops. Once they got clear of traffic, the familiar rhythm of the road took over and John could let his attention wander.

Dean climbed up over the front seat to claim shotgun as soon as Sammy fell asleep, somewhere in West Virginia, and John found himself talking about things he hadn't thought about in years, things he would have sworn he'd put behind him, things he'd thought he stopped caring about after Missouri had shown him the truth about Mary's death.

There was one thing John didn't say--they had an unspoken deal, he and Dean, about Mary and not talking about her. It was tempting to chalk it up to Dean and the nightmares he'd had for years, but it was as much John's thing as it was Dean's and maybe today was the day they should start moving on from that, too.

"A long time ago," John said, finally, not taking his eyes off the road in front of him. "Your mom told me I should go do what I just did, but I didn't want to hear it." He could see Dean, right on the edge of his vision; see the quick, startled look Dean shot him before he mimicked John and stared out the windshield, folding in on himself.

John reminded himself that what was right wasn't always easy, but he was glad they were on their way to Jim's and the relative peace his home had always offered them.

 

***

They made it into Ohio before midnight and probably could have kept going, but John had driven through the last night on little more than a nap and he thought it was probably best to stop. Dean would normally talk to him, keep him awake on long drives, but tonight, there was nothing but Jack Buck and the Cards fading in and out through the mountains. Dean wouldn't sleep--the nightmares were almost guaranteed to come after what John had said--but he wasn't talking either.

The motel he found was cleaner than most, with a night clerk at the front desk and a coffeemaker in the room; it might as well count as a four-star property. John draped Sammy over his left shoulder, fumbling for the room key with his right. Weighed down by the duffel he'd insisted on carrying, Dean stumbled along behind him, darn near dead on his feet from what John could tell, but still stubbornly awake.

John had lain Sammy down and was digging through the bag for toothbrushes when Dean spoke for the first time in hours.

"Dad? Was she…was Mom right?"

John kept his hands--and voice--steady as he handed over Dean's toothbrush. "Your mom was always right, Dean. Especially about stuff like this."

"Okay," Dean said, yawning and forgetting to cover his mouth. "Good."

He turned and slipped into the bathroom, brushing his teeth and dropping his clothes in a haphazard pile before he crawled under the sheets next to Sammy.

John waited up, watching over them for hours, but both boys slept through the night.

**Author's Note:**

> So many thanks to the usual suspects: [](http://without-me.livejournal.com/profile)[**without_me**](http://without-me.livejournal.com/) for keeping me honest in grammar and style; [](http://cardamom-23.livejournal.com/profile)[**cardamom_23**](http://cardamom-23.livejournal.com/) for laughing in my face when I insisted I didn't have time for this challenge; [](http://synecdochic.livejournal.com/profile)[**synecdochic**](http://synecdochic.livejournal.com/) and [](http://unholyglee.livejournal.com/profile)[**unholyglee**](http://unholyglee.livejournal.com/) for gut-checking the first draft; and [](http://wendy.livejournal.com/profile)[**wendy**](http://wendy.livejournal.com/) who told me it would all be fine over pancakes and french toast. Y'all rock!
> 
> Also, this story really wouldn't have made it past a couple of notes without the [Super-wiki](http://supernatural.oscillating.net/index.php?title=Main_Page) and their awesome collection of canon.


End file.
